All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [322]
When the US commitment to the Allied cause became explicit, Hitler could no longer discern advantage in sparing Jews within his reach. ‘In autumn 1941,’ writes Longerich, ‘the Nazi leadership began to fight the war on all levels as a war “against the Jews”.’ The construction of gas chambers commenced at Chelmno, Bełec, Auschwitz and elsewhere. Gas trucks had already been employed for the murder of mental patients in Germany and parts of the Nazi empire. Himmler welcomed wider use of such technology, not least to ease the psychological strain which mass shootings imposed on his SS. By autumn 1941, Zyklon B was killing selected prisoners at Auschwitz and elsewhere – though at that stage, most victims were non-Jews. Local initiatives by SS officers, rather than a coherent central directive, determined who died.
In mid-October 1941, mass deportations of Jews from the Reich began, with thousands being dispatched variously to Łód, Riga, Kaunas and Minsk. Among the designated victims there were more than a few suicides, and in the light of events it is hard to suggest that those who took this course were ill-advised. Hans Michaelis was a retired lawyer in Charlottenburg. Just before being transported, he sent for his niece. ‘Maria,’ he said, ‘I don’t have much time. What should I do? What is easiest, what’s the most dignified? To live or to die? To suffer a terrible fate or to end one’s own life?’ His niece wrote: ‘We speak. We examine both possibilities. We ask ourselves what his late wife … would have advised. Again he grabs the clock.’ Then he said, ‘I have 50 hours left here, at most! … Thank God that my Gertrud died a normal death, before Hitler. What would I give for that! … Maria, see how time flies!’ As at last they parted, she said, ‘Uncle Hans, you will know the right thing to do. Farewell.’ Hans Michaelis took poison.
A Berliner named Hilde Meikley watched the removal of local Jews: ‘Sadly I have to say that many people stood in the doorways voicing their pleasure as the wretched column went by. “Just look at those cheeky Jews!” someone shouted. “They’re laughing now, but their last hour has come.”’ The victims were permitted to carry fifty kilograms of baggage apiece. All their valuables were seized at the departure stations, where body searches were conducted and passengers were required to pay fares. Luggage was loaded onto freight wagons, never to be seen again by its owners. Local authorities took possession of vacated housing, which was reallocated to eager new tenants. The rhetoric of Rosenberg and Goebbels, acknowledging the fact of the deportations to the world, was uncompromising. Rosenberg told a November 1941 press conference: ‘Some six million Jews still live in the east, and this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals.’
If the Nazis bore responsibility for the Holocaust, they were assisted in their crimes by some, if not most, of the regimes of occupied Europe. Anti-Semitism, albeit less homicidal than in Germany, was commonplace. Mihail Sebastian, a Jewish writer briefly conscripted into the Romanian army, noted the attitude of many of his fellow soldiers, which contributed to their acquiescence in Nazi dominance of Romania’s polity: ‘Voichita Aurel, my comrade in the Twenty-First Infantry, said something yesterday about Captain Capsuneanu, something that sums up a whole Romanian style of politics: “He’s a real mean bastard who’ll beat you and swear at you. But there’s one good thing about him: he can’t stand yids and lets us have a go at them too.”’ Sebastian wrote: ‘That is precisely the consolation that the Germans offer the Czechs and Poles, and which they are prepared to offer the Romanians.’ The German occupation of France